Snowbound

by Bill Pronzini

  Rebecca had still not come home, and he was relieved that she hadn’t. He did not want to face her now, with his thoughts and his emotions focused on Peggy Tyler’s lush sexuality. She would be home when he got back from the lake at nine or so, and he would tell her then of his contrived impotence. In just a few short hours, he thought as he hurried out of the house, everything would again be exactly as it had always been.

  Twenty

  Compulsively, Cain put on his coat at six fifty and went out of the cabin and started down into the village.

  He walked at a desultory pace, only superficially aware of the cold night and the snow-hazed lights below. His destination was the Valley Inn, and his purpose was to buy himself another bottle of bourbon-he kept telling himself that this was his purpose. There was an unopened quart in the cabin’s kitchen that he had purchased in the Mercantile that morning-enough to last him through the long Sunday ahead-but the desolation in him had become so acute the ache was almost physical.

  The past two days had been interminable. After returning from the village Wednesday afternoon, where he had learned with indifference of the avalanche and the fact that the valley was snowbound until after Christmas, he had been completely exhausted. Sleep came immediately that night; but it had been restless and shallow, and he had awakened from it gritty-eyed and stiff-muscled and despondent. He’d thought again of Frank McNeil’s accusations, and the threat of arrest for something he had not done, and the imminent arrival of probing county police. All right then, he’d decided, let them come and let them ask their questions, and when the episode was concluded, he damned well would get out of this Hidden Valley where people persisted in pushing their way into his privacy; he would go somewhere else, he would find a place where the people would leave him utterly alone.

  Then he’d thought: But was there such a place? Was there anywhere in the world where people would leave you utterly alone? Or would it always be as it had become here: intrusions, invasions, interference? And would. the loneliness, the ambivalence continue to plague him wherever he went? It had seemed so simple in the beginning: just go to a small mountain village where no one knew you and no one cared to know you, and live apart, and die by degrees. For six months he had managed to do that, but now it had all started to collapse; it was no longer simple at all.

  And tonight, he was going to the inn to buy a bottle he did not need, because he might need it and because it was Saturday night and he was desperately lonely for companionship that he wanted but did not want.

  When he reached Sierra Street, he crossed directly toward the inn. Two and a half stories high, and a full block wide, it was the largest building in Hidden Valley. It had a double-balconied, redwood-shingled facade designed to give the impression of comfortable rusticity-alight now with its Christmas decorations-and two separate entrances: one to the small lobby and one to the restaurant-and-lounge that constituted most of its interior at street level. The upper floors were divided into eleven rooms, including the large apartment in which the Hallidays lived.

  Cain hesitated in front of the restaurant-and-lounge entrance. Light glowed behind a large frosted window, and there was the sound of soft music and muted conversation from within. Apprehension fluttered in his stomach, but he went woodenly to the door and opened it and stepped inside.

  The interior had a low, beamed ceiling and was bisected by square redwood supports. Waist-high partitions, topped with planter boxes of wood ferns, had been erected between the posts. The restaurant area to the right was empty and dark, chairs stacked on tables, closed for the winter season. Only the lounge on the left side was open, dimly lit by two electrically wired wagonwheel chandeliers suspended from the rafters. Eight booths with high, varnished wood backs were set along the partitions; dark leather stools flanked a leather-fronted bar against the far left wall. The rear wall and part of that behind the bar were adorned with deer antlers and glass-eyed deer heads; a glass-fronted case containing two matching and ornate shotguns, replete with boxes of shells; fishing creels and rods and corkboard displays of colored trout flies. Some fifteen people occupied the lounge, most of those in the booths. Only one man-Joe Garvey-sat at the bar, at the upper end, talking with Walt Halliday.

  Cain brushed snow from his coat and stamped it soft-footed from his boots. Then he walked slowly and directly to the bar, not looking at the people in the booths, and sat on the end stool staring straight ahead. A full minute passed before Halliday came down to him.

  “Can I get a bottle off-sale?” Cain asked him.

  A frown creased Halliday’s plump face; he hesitated. “We don’t usually sell off-sale,” he said finally.

  “I’ll pay extra for it.”

  “No need for that. Okay-what brand?”

  “Old Grandad.”

  “Set you up a drink too?”

  “No, I don’t… yes. Grandad straight up.”

  “Chaser of some kind?”

  “Nothing, just the shot.”

  Halliday hesitated again, as if he wanted to say something further. Then he shrugged and poured the drink and set the shot glass in front of Cain, took a full bottle from the backbar display, put that down, made change from the twenty Cain slid across the polished surface, and went back to the other end of the plank. When Cain lifted the glass, he was peripherally conscious of Halliday and Garvey looking at him and talking in low voices. He turned slightly on his stool, so that he could see nothing but the rimed front window, and tasted his bourbon. It burned in his mouth, his throat, the hollow of his belly. He put the glass down again and lit a cigarette.

  Some of the conversation seemed to have abated behind him, and he sensed that others in the room were also looking at him. He felt conspicuous, like something curious on display. Get out of here, he thought urgently, they don’t want you and you don’t want them, you don’t want any of this; go back to the cabin, be alone.

  He swallowed his drink, dropped the cigarette into an ashtray, caught the bottle off the bar with his left hand, and moved hurriedly to the door. Turning out of it, he walked with rapid steps and head down to the corner-and ran into the woman just coming out of Lassen Drive from the west. The left side of his body bumped hard against her and threw her off-balance, so that she seemed about to fall into the packed snow at the curbing. Automatically Cain flung out his right hand and caught her arm, steadying her.

  It was Rebecca Hughes.

  She stared at him through the lightly falling flakes, and her mouth crooked into a bitter smile. “Well,” she said, “we do seem to keep running into each other, don’t we, Mr. Cain? Literally, this time.” She shrugged off his hand and started away from him.

  The shame he had experienced on Wednesday returned all at once, the loneliness made a plaintive cry, and he heard himself say impetuously, “Wait Mrs. Hughes, wait, listen I’m sorry, I’m sorry I ran into you just now and I’m sorry for the way I acted the other night, I had no right to do that.”

  It stopped her. Slowly, she turned to face him again. Her features smoothed somewhat, and the bitterness was tempered now with surprise and a wary puzzlement. She did not say anything, looking at him.

  The act of speaking seemed to have had a strangely cathartic effect on Cain. He said again, heavy-voiced, “I’m sorry.”

  Rebecca continued to look at him in steady silence. At length the wariness faded, and she sighed softly and said, “All right. I’m hardly blameless myself for the other night; it was foolish of me to have gone in the first place.”

  “You only wanted what you said-some simple companionship; I suppose I knew that all along. But it’s not the same for me, can you understand that? I don’t need it. ”

  “Everyone needs it, Mr. Cain.”

  “All I need is to be alone-that’s all.”

  Rebecca asked quietly, “Why did you all of a sudden decide to apologize to me? You just… looked at me on Wednesday afternoon. You didn’t say anything at all then.”

  “I couldn’t.”

  “Why cou
ldn’t you?”

  “I don’t want to talk to anybody.”

  “You’re talking to me now, on your initiative.”

  “Yes,” Cain said. And then, abruptly and without prior thought: “Maybe… maybe you do have to have conversations with somebody once in a while, maybe you can’t help yourself. It’s all a matter of words.”

  “Words?”

  “They pile up inside you,” Cain said. He felt vaguely lightheaded, now. “Thousands of words piling up and piling up until there are so many of them you can’t hold them in anymore; they just come spilling out.”

  “I’ve never thought of it that way before, but yes, I can understand what you mean.” She paused. “And I guess the same is true of emotions and needs and frustrations, isn’t it? You can’t bottle them up forever either; they have to find an outlet of some kind.”

  “No. No, just words. Too many unspoken words.”

  Rebecca studied him for a time. “I was on my way home,” she said. “Are you going back to the cabin now?”

  “Yes.”

  “We could walk together as far as my house.”

  No, Cain thought. And said, “All right.”

  They went across Sierra Street and started up Lassen. In a sporadic way they talked of the slide, only that and nothing of a more personal nature. The spontaneity was gone; the flow of words from within him had ebbed into a trickle of words. Cain felt himself retreating again-wanted it that way, did not want it that way. When they reached the drive of the Hughes’ house, he said immediately, awkwardly, “Good night, Mrs. Hughes,” waited long enough to glimpse the small, brief smile she gave him and to hear her say, “Good night, Mr. Cain,” and then turned away. He sensed, as he continued rapidly along the road, that she was watching him; but he did not look back.

  All the way up to the cabin he was aware of the sound of the wind in the surrounding trees-the lonely, lonely sound of the wind…

  Twenty-One

  Peggy Tyler reached the stand of red fir just above the lake roads fork at ten minutes before seven. Her mother had returned from the Chiltons just after Matt’s telephone call, and Peggy had told her she was going for a walk and then to the inn for a while. At six twenty she had left the house, at the western end of Shasta Street, and had turned right instead of left and slipped through the thick growth of trees well to the rear of All Faiths Church, circling toward the fork. She had seen no one, and she was certain no one had seen her.

  She positioned herself at the bole of one of the firs nearest Mule Deer Lake Road, shivering slightly inside her furtrimmed parka, and looked down into the village. Shining hazily through the thin gauze of snow, the lights seemed more remote than they actually were. The streets were typically deserted, and car headlamps were nonexistent.

  Now that she was here, waiting in the heavy darkness and the kind of whispering quiet you found only on mountain nights, she was more nervous than she had been earlier. But it was an anticipatory feeling, born not of apprehension but of exhilaration. The past few days had been oh-so-deadly dull, with nothing to do except to watch barely discernible images flickering on the television screen and nowhere to go except out into the very environment she so passionately hated. The prospect of an adventurous balling session in what was literally her own backyard was intoxicating: a lovely and audacious private joke to be played on all the smug little people who lived in this damned valley, one of the few experiences of her life in the Sierra that she would be able to look back on with fondness and pleasure.

  Of course, there was a certain hazard involved, though not nearly as great for her as for Matt. She didn’t give a hair what Hidden Valley thought of her, her mother included, and she didn’t give a hair for Matt’s saintly reputation; if their affair were discovered, it surely wouldn’t have any real effect on her long-range plans. The only consequence of discovery, as far as she was concerned, would be that the goose who laid the golden eggs would be dead: no more generous cash presents like the thousand-dollar Christmas surprise. Still, she wasn’t worried. If Matt was willing to chance it-and it wasn’t really much of a chance, the way he had outlined it-then she was too…

  A pair of lights moving in the village intruded on her thoughts, and she saw that a car had swung onto Sierra Street just beyond the Mercantile. It passed the church, and even though she was unable to distinguish the make, she knew it would be Matt’s. Behind the car, the village streets still appeared empty. She swiveled her head to look south along Mule Deer Lake Road; the wall of night there was unbroken.

  When the car approached the stand of fir, it slowed almost to a crawl. Peggy waited until it had drawn abreast of her hiding place and then hurried out and opened the door and slipped inside. The dome light did not go on, Matt had done something to the bulb-clever Matt! She curled her body low on the seat, whispering a greeting, as the car picked up speed again.

  He reached out a hand and stroked her hair. “Peggy,” he said, “Peggy, Peggy.”

  She smiled and moved over, resting her head on his thigh, the fingers of her right hand stroking over his knee. His breathing came fast and heavy and she sensed the front of his trousers begin to bulge. He said thickly, “There’s not a soul on the streets. I made sure of that before I pulled out.”

  “No one saw me either.”

  Peggy kept on stroking his leg, higher now, one fingernail moving across the bulge and making him jump convulsively. The area between her own legs had begun to moisten, to pulse demandingly; damn, but she was horny! “Hurry and get to the cabin, Matt. I’m on fire for you.”

  “I know,” he whispered. “I know. ”

  It seemed to take a long time for them to reach Mule Deer Lake, a long time before he said, “We’re almost there. I’m going to switch off the headlights now.”

  “Can you see the lake?” she asked as the dashboard went dark.

  “Yes. No lights anywhere, except in the cabin where those businessmen are staying. It’s just up ahead.”

  Three additional minutes crept away, and then Peggy felt the car turn and the wheels bounced jarringly; they came to a stop. Hughes said, “We’re here.”

  Peggy sat up, looking through the windshield: a blank wooden wall, the inner wall of the Taggart garage. Hughes had the driver’s door open, and she followed him out on that side. They clasped hands and left the garage and went around to the front door of the cabin, on the lake side. The flat, frozen surface of Mule Deer Lake, ridged with snow, stretched out into deep black; the opposite shore was totally obscured by darkness. The only light was a distant glimmer to the north: the businessmen’s place. It was so still that Peggy could hear the beating of her heart.

  Hughes keyed open the door. “You see?” he said against her ear. “Nothing to worry about, not a thing. Nobody saw us, and nobody can possibly know we’re here…”

  Kubion knew somebody was there.

  He saw the darkly indistinct shape of the car coming without headlights along the lake road, saw it just as he was about to get into his own car parked in front of a two-story, green-shuttered frame house some distance down the shore. Through the thin snowfall he watched it swing off the road at the Taggart cabin and then disappear. Nobody was supposed to be living in that cabin-he’d found out in the village earlier in the day which of the lake dwellings were occupied and which weren’t-and he thought: Well now, just what’ve we got here? Eskimo kids looking for a place to hump?

  Smiling fixedly, he slid into the car and started the engine, also leaving his headlamps off, and drove to within fifty yards of the cabin and parked on the side of the road. The building’s windows showed no light; whoever it was was probably still in the car. Kubion thought: Fuck her, I did-an old teen-age taunt-and laughed deep in his throat. He sat there for a time: still no lights. Finally he reached for the ignition key, started to turn it; hesitated and released it again. Oh hell, he thought, the more the merrier.

  He opened the glove compartment and removed a flashlight and got out of the car. His eyes, wide and unblin
king, shone like a cat’s in the darkness.

  The interior of the cabin was winter-chilled and subterranean black. Hughes closed the door and said softly, “We’ll stay here for a minute, until we can see well enough to walk without banging into things.”

  They stood pressed together, waiting, and eventually Peggy could make out the distorted shapes of furniture, the doors in two walls which would lead to other rooms. Watchfully, they crossed to one of the doors, and Matt widened it and said, “Kitchen,” and led her to another. Beyond this one was a short hallway, with a door in each wall; the one on the left opened on the larger of the cabin’s two bedrooms.

  The bed was queen-sized and unmade, but folded across the foot of the mattress was a thin patchwork quilt; they would need that because of the cold, Peggy thought-later, afterward. They stood by the bed and kissed hungrily, undressing each other in the darkness with fumbling urgency, and then they fell onto the bed, kicking the last of their clothing free, their mouths still melded together. Peggy took hold of his erection in both her hands and heard him moan, and he broke the kiss to whisper feverishly, “Put it in, put it in, I can’t wait!” clutching at her breasts as if bracing himself, and she guided him over her and into the waiting wetness of her and he made a jerking, heaving motion as she drew her legs back and said, “Peggy, ah ah ah Peggy!” and came shudderingly.

  The rigidity left all his body at once, and he was dead weight on top of her, his face pressed to her neck. Peggy’s lips pursed in mild annoyance, but when he raised his head finally to tell her he was sorry, he just couldn’t hold himself back, she said, “It’s all right, we have plenty of time, baby, we have plenty of time.” She held him flaccid inside her, moving her hips, seeking to make him hard again, and when she began to succeed she said smilingly, “That’s it, that’s my Matt,” and he commenced rocking over her and into her, expertly now, and it was the way it had been in Whitewater, it was perfectly synchronized and wildly good, and she could feel the beginnings of orgasm fluttering and building in her and flung herself upward at him, reaching for it, reaching for it — and then a bright white beam sliced away the blackness like a sudden spotlight and pinned their glistening bodies on the bed.